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Part II: Food for Profit

Part II: Food for Profit – How Corporations Engineered Hunger in a World of Plenty In a world of unprecedented agricultural abundance, I am sure that I am not the only one who is struck by the cruel paradox that billions still go hungry, while others are dying from diseases of overconsumption. This situation—scarcity amid plenty, malnutrition amid surplus—is no accident. I believe it is the calculated outcome of a food system built not to feed people, but to feed profits.

Part I: The Legal Lie

Part I: The Legal Lie How Corporate Personhood Slowly Broke the World I’ve always held a firm belief that in a democracy, we, the people, are supposed to be in charge. Yet, over the last 150 years, we’ve mostly missed a silent coup unfold—one that has steadily replaced the citizen with the shareholder, the voter with the lobbyist, and the human being with a legal fiction: the corporation as a person.

Part 4: A Cooperative Future for Public LoRaWAN

The dream of a global, public LoRaWAN network is a powerful one. While private LoRaWAN networks thrive for specific industrial and agricultural applications, the vision of a ubiquitous, low-cost network for tracking, sensing, and connecting the physical world remains just out of reach. We’ve seen two major attempts to build this future, each a fork in the road leading to a dead end. First came The Things Network (TTN), a noble, grassroots effort built on altruism. It did an admirable job, proving the power of a community-built network. But without a sustainable incentive model, it relied on the goodwill of gateway operators, a foundation that proved too fragile for global scale.

Part 3: From Degenerative to Regenerative

The Principles Are Sound After dissecting the broken models of the DePIN space, it would be easy to become cynical and dismiss the entire concept as a failed experiment. But that would be a mistake. The foundational principles of DePIN—of community-owned infrastructure, aligned incentives, and open access—are more powerful and necessary than ever. The failure is not in the vision; it is in the execution. The degenerative patterns I’ve observed are not inevitable. They are choices. They are the choices that lead down a path of techno-feudalism, where technology is used to centralise power, enforce scarcity, and ultimately render communities into surplus populations. It is time to choose a different path.

Growing Data Foundation

Supporting Open Solutions for Social Good The Growing Data Foundation (GDF) is a volunteer-based, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to fostering open projects and systems for community improvement and social good. Since its establishment in 2015, the GDF has been a key supporter of the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem in South Australia, promoting economic, environmental, and social sustainability through technology. SEIN’s Collaboration At SEIN, we believe in the power of open technology and community-driven initiatives. We are excited to partner with the Growing Data Foundation, lending our technical expertise to several of their innovative environmental sensing projects.

Part 2: DePIN's Fork in the Road

A Pattern Emerges The story of Helium, as I detailed in my first post, is not an anomaly. The slide from a grand vision of a “People’s Network” into a centrally-controlled system that primarily benefits its founders and a small handful of insiders is, unfortunately, a well-trodden path in the DePIN space. The issues of opaque governance, extractive tokenomics, and a disregard for the actual community that builds the network are not bugs; they are features of a flawed and deeply ingrained model.

Part 1: The Reality of DePIN

The Seductive Pitch The term DePIN, or Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks, carries an almost utopian promise. It paints a picture of a world where the essential physical networks we rely on—from wireless and mobile connectivity to mapping and sensor data—are built not by faceless corporations, but by us. It’s a vision of grassroots collaboration, where individuals are empowered to deploy hardware, share resources, and collectively own the infrastructure of tomorrow.

The Things Network South Australia

In a world dominated by centralised, corporate-owned networks, what if we could build our own? What if the infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT)—the very network that connects our sensors to the digital world—was owned and operated by the community it serves? This isn’t a hypothetical question. This is the reality of The Things Network (TTN), and it represents the very essence of the ‘Sense’ philosophy at the heart of SEIN.